Monthly Archives: February 2018

LIMA, Peru — When it comes to plotting a brazen prison escape, there may be few stratagems more effective — or soulless — than swapping places with your unwitting identical twin. That was the ploy adopted by Alexander Jheferson Delgado, a convicted sex offender and burglar, who has just been recaptured more than a year after escaping prison by drugging his twin brother and then dressing in his clothes. The escape happened on the morning of Jan. 10, 2017, when Alexander’s twin, Giancarlo Stuard Delgado, showed up at Piedras Gordas prison to visit…Read more …

LIMA, Peru — When Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s combative socialist president, decided not to run in his country's 2017 presidential election, the move was widely interpreted as a tactical retreat. The strategy, commentators agreed, was to let his protege, Lenín Moreno, keep his seat warm for a single term — and take the blame for the country’s stalling economy — while Correa’s approval ratings recovered ahead of a triumphant return in the 2021 election. But if that was the plan, it has backfired spectacularly. Ecuadorans voted overwhelmingly on Sunday to approve constitutional changes that…Read more …

LIMA, Peru – Ada Ochoa still recalls the terrifying moments when she last saw her husband, Felando Castillo, alive. Around 15 men, wearing black jumpers and balaclavas burst into the couple’s modest home in Pativilca, a coastal district a couple of hours north of Lima, the Peruvian capital, during the early hours of January 29, 1992. Shouting obscenities and death threats, the men — thought to be from a secret military death squad allegedly taking orders from then president Alberto Fujimori — frog marched Castillo, 38, a subsistence farmer and father of three…Read more …